Blackfoot Reservation

Like the colors of a roulette wheel, the Blackfoot reservation is bifurcated sharply between the winners and losers. Belonging to the larger Blackfoot Confederacy, the Kainai-dominated scrap of land is best known to outsiders for the thriving Beavertail Casino and those other businesses like the Ghost Elk Lodge that suck from the casino’s lucrative teat. Nestled in the shadow of the Cloven Hoof mountain, this outward-facing section of the Kainai Reserve is bright, busy, and booming. Few save its residents know or see its ‘other’ side.

Once home to roving buffalo herds, the pine and fire studded slopes are carved by scrub-brush streams that split and merge with the Green Lady before they spill over the eponymous Falls. But the idyllic scenery is marked by a profound sense of loss. The herds are gone, the echo of their hooves only captured by itinerant thunder. The tribe is a small fraction of its once-feared strength, decimated by its lost way of life, settler diseases and drugs, and the malaise of federal and tribal handouts mixed with generational poverty.